Full Visibility on SDLC: What to Track and How to Track It

If you're leading or building software, chances are you've hit walls you couldn’t fully explain. Maybe a release slipped through with bugs. Maybe a sprint ended, and you still didn’t know where the time went. Or maybe leadership asked for updates, and you had no clean answers.

You’re not alone, and you’re not the problem. The gap isn’t you. It’s visibility. Without seeing what’s really happening at each stage of the software development lifecycle, you’re left guessing.

So, in this article, you’ll learn how to get full visibility on SDLC, so you can make clearer decisions and lead with confidence, backed by data. But first, let’s start with the basics…

What Is SDLC?

The software development lifecycle (SDLC) is the process you follow to plan, build, test, and maintain software. It’s the framework that keeps your projects moving and your teams aligned. Each phase gives you a clear step to focus on, so nothing falls through the cracks. Without SDLC, software typically runs over budget, ships late, or breaks under pressure.

A study by BITKOM e.V. found that 75% of IT projects fail due to errors in the set-up phase, including unclear requirements and inadequate communication. That’s why understanding SDLC isn’t optional. It should be your starting point.

This quick explainer video gives you a snapshot if you’re more of a visual learner.

How Does SDLC Work?

You can’t fix what you can’t see, and that’s exactly why understanding how SDLC works matters. It gives you a clear view of how software gets built, step by step, and where things usually go off track.

To make smart decisions, you need to know where the work happens, where problems usually show up, and what each development stage is supposed to deliver. So, let’s talk about the key phases and models that shape how SDLC functions in real teams like yours.

SDLC Phases

Each phase of the SDLC serves a specific purpose and feeds directly into the next. But in practice, they usually overlap, especially in fast-moving environments. Here’s what you’ll typically work through:

Plan

This is where you define what the software needs to do, who it’s for, and how you’ll get there. It might sound obvious, but poor planning causes 39% of all project failures, which makes this step very important. You should gather input, estimate resources, align timelines, and write it all down so no one’s guessing later.

“Good people with a good process will outperform good people with no process every time.” - Grady Booch, an American software engineer

Design

Here, your ideas take shape. You define architecture, systems, interfaces, and user flows. It's also where you lock in the biggest cost decisions. Around 70% of a product’s total lifecycle cost is set during this phase. And it’s a risk point too, since up to 65% of software defects start here because things weren’t thought through or validated properly.

Implement

This is where the code gets written. Your devs follow the design documents, using the right tools, libraries, and workflows to build the features. The cleaner the design and planning, the smoother this part usually goes. If not, things slow down fast.

Test

This is where quality comes into focus. You run manual and automated tests to catch bugs and mismatches. It’s no small task because testing can eat up 70% of the total effort in a full SDLC, but skipping it leads to much worse outcomes down the line. A smart testing loop saves you time and reputation.

Deploy

This is when you push your product to users. Whether it's a full launch or staged rollout, this phase has real pressure. In the UK alone, more than 80% of businesses face software deployment delays, usually losing months and money, which can be up to £107,000 a year per company on average.

Maintain

Once the software is live, it still needs care. Fixes, updates, user support…  all of it falls here. Of that work, about 17% to 21% is spent fixing bugs found after release, which is why earlier phases (such as design and testing) matter so much. But you can’t catch everything. Maintenance keeps the product alive and useful.

Now, let’s talk about the models…

SDLC Models

You can follow the SDLC phases in different ways, depending on your team’s needs and project risks. These are some of the most common models and how they play out:

Waterfall

The Waterfall model is linear. You finish one phase before moving to the next. It works best for projects with clear, fixed requirements. But it’s rigid because if something changes later, going backward is tough. And that shows in results because Waterfall projects have a 58% success rate, which is lower than more adaptive approaches.

Spiral

Spiral development combines structure with flexibility because it helps you pivot between process models, from waterfall to incremental. It’s ideal for complex or risky projects, especially when you're working with evolving tech or unknowns. What makes it effective is the focus on risk management.

According to a white paper from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, spiral development works through repeated planning and risk analysis cycles. These cycles allow teams to reassess progress regularly and adapt the system based on feedback, which typically leads to better results.

Iterative

The Iterative model helps you build software in repeated loops. You deliver a basic, working version early, then improve it over time. This is useful when you want to test ideas quickly or handle changing requirements. Unlike linear approaches, it accepts that you won’t get everything right on the first try.

Agile

Agile is an iterative process, but it is a specific framework. It breaks work into short, time-boxed sprints with clear goals. You deliver working software, get feedback from users and stakeholders, and then adjust. Agile encourages close collaboration, fast decisions, and ongoing improvement.

That’s part of why Agile projects succeed 70% of the time, and is much higher than Waterfall’s 58%. The failure rate is just 8%, which shows how well this model works for teams under pressure to move fast and stay flexible.

Understanding the process is just step one, but what really matters is how clearly you can see it while it’s happening. So, let’s talk about that for a minute…

Why Is Developer Visibility on SDLC Important?

Without visibility, even your best plans can fall apart. You might be tracking deadlines, but if you can’t see where time is really going, what’s stuck, or why bugs keep slipping through, you’re just reacting. Visibility into your SDLC lets you lead proactively, not from a dashboard full of surprises, but from data that tells the real story.

“The purpose of software engineering is to control complexity, not to create it.” - Dr. Pamela Zave, an American computer scientist now working at Princeton University

Here are the outcomes you unlock when your team gains full visibility into the development process:

• Stronger growth potential. When you’re delivering better software faster, you're opening doors to new revenue and faster market wins. Visibility helps you spot what’s working and double down on it.
• Better product quality. Teams with visibility into dev workflows report 20-30% fewer customer-reported defects. This improves the experience from day one.
• Faster, smoother production. You can identify bottlenecks early, shift resources, and reduce friction without losing momentum.
• Lower development costs. Data shows that teams with strong visibility spend 48% less time on unplanned work, which saves them hours and reduces budget drift.
• Better team communication. With shared data, developers, product managers, and executives stay on the same page, instead of guessing based on partial updates.
• Lower risk exposure. When you catch issues before they grow, you reduce failure points and avoid last-minute rollbacks or delays.
• More visibility into your entire development process. You get clarity on what’s actually happening, from code to strategy, and avoid relying on guesswork.
• Clearer estimates and planning. You get better at forecasting because you’re working from live insights, not assumptions.
• Happier customers. Less guesswork and better timing lead to cleaner releases and higher satisfaction.

At Chrono, we help you bring this visibility into focus. You get a clear view of opportunities, threats, and bottlenecks, so you’re not solving problems in the dark. You’re seeing them early, acting fast, and leading smarter.

To get that kind of clarity, you need to track the right data at every level.

SDLC Visibility Metrics

Visibility doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone on your team. What matters to you as a developer isn’t always what your CTO or CPO needs to see.

If you're a developer, your focus is on day-to-day flow. You care about DORA metrics such as lead time, deployment frequency, and change failure rate. Also, you’re likely tracking flow metrics to catch delivery slowdowns and watching code quality to avoid technical debt piling up.

At the leadership level, it’s a different view. You still care about DORA and flow, but you also need clarity on initiative-level ROI, where effort is going, and how the budget is tracking. Strategic alignment, resourcing decisions, and R&D tax credit reporting all depend on having the right visibility in place.

The key is making sure these views connect. With Chrono, you’re not switching between dashboards or exporting endless reports but looking at live metrics that speak to both execution and strategy.

How to Achieve Visibility in an Agile Environment

Visibility doesn’t just happen because your team uses Agile. If anything, the speed and structure of Agile can blur the big picture unless you’re intentional. To gain full visibility across teams, tools, and workflows, you need a plan that aligns everyone from developers to executives.

Here are eight practical steps to help you build real visibility into your Agile environment.

1. Make Your Case to Stakeholders and Teams

Getting visibility tools in place typically starts with a conversation, and not always an easy one. Leadership might hesitate to invest in another platform, and engineers may worry about being tracked or micromanaged.

To move things forward, show how visibility solves real problems. Talk about missed deadlines, unclear roadmaps, and frustrating handoffs. Emphasize outcomes such as better planning, faster delivery, and fewer bugs. You’re not monitoring people, but making the whole process easier to manage.

Even simple charts showing where time and effort go can spark alignment. When stakeholders see how blind spots are slowing down progress, they’re more likely to back your plan.

2. Consider Your North Star Metric

A North Star Metric is the one measurement that best reflects the long-term value your product delivers to users and the overall growth of your business. It acts as a single point of focus that keeps every team aligned, even in the chaos of daily Agile work.

For Spotify, it’s “time spent listening.” For Airbnb, it’s “nights booked.” Your North Star should tie directly to growth, show customer impact, and be simple enough that every team can rally around it. When this metric goes up, your business should benefit across the board.

Pick the wrong one, and you create noise. Pick the right one, and it brings clarity to every sprint, story, and stand-up.

3. Set Specific Objectives with KPIs

Once your North Star is set, break it into focused objectives for each team or product area. Then choose the KPIs that show progress clearly. These might include cycle time, release frequency, or incident volume, whatever best reflects real movement in your delivery.

Make your goals measurable and visible across teams. If you can’t see it, you can’t fix it. KPIs create early warnings, spot risks, and drive better decisions across your SDLC.

4. Set Secondary Metrics

Every metric needs a balance. Speed without quality leads to bad releases. Growth without retention means churn. That’s where secondary metrics come in, and they help you stay grounded.

For example, if your goal is to ship faster, track lead time. But also monitor defect rates to make sure quality isn’t slipping. One study found that balancing production speed with quality indicators helps prevent long-term damage to product reliability.

So, don’t overdo it. Pick two or three secondary metrics that help keep your primary goals honest.

5. Pick the Right Project Management Tool

Agile lives and dies by how you manage work. Whether you’re using Jira, Linear, or ClickUp, your tool should make it easy to track work across teams, see blockers, and report on progress without jumping through hoops.

You should look for features such as sprint reporting, integration with Git tools, and views that let devs, product leads, and execs see what matters most to them. A good project management tool organizes tasks and brings clarity to the day-to-day chaos.

6. Break Silos Between Teams

You can’t fix what you can’t see, and that includes what’s happening in other teams. Engineering, product, QA, and design usually drift apart in Agile environments, which leads to duplicate work, missed handoffs, and scattered feedback.

To break those silos, you should share dashboards, run cross-team reviews, and use tools that connect the dots. Visibility doesn’t mean forcing everyone into the same process. It means creating shared context so decisions are faster and better.

7. Involve All Relevant Stakeholders

Visibility isn’t just for the engineering team. Product managers, designers, finance leads, and execs all benefit when they can see how initiatives are progressing.

Certain sources indicate that projects with actively engaged stakeholders succeed 78% of the time, compared to just 40% without solid engagement. That’s a massive gap you can’t afford to ignore.

So, bring stakeholders in early. Show them what’s being worked on, how it maps to goals, and where support is needed.

Also, use visuals. Keep it clear. Engagement rises when people feel informed and involved.

8. Consider an Engineering Intelligence Platform

Traditional Agile tools weren’t built to answer strategic questions like: Where’s the team effort going? Are we using resources effectively? Are we on track financially?

That’s where an engineering intelligence platform such as Chrono Platform comes in. We pull data from your existing tools and give you clean, actionable insights across delivery, finance, and strategy. You can track ROI, measure engineering performance, and tie work back to business value in one place.

Gartner predicts that adoption of software engineering intelligence (SEI) platforms will jump from 5% in 2024 to 50% by 2027. That’s a clear sign that visibility at this level is becoming essential, not optional.

Agile is fast, but without visibility, it’s easy to lose your direction. When you bring the right tools, metrics, and people into view, you create a system that not only moves quickly but also moves smart. Chrono helps you do just that, turning data into decisions across your entire SDLC.

To help you picture it, let’s see a few examples that show full SDLC visibility in action.

Full Visibility on SDLC Examples

Seeing your data clearly is one thing. Turning that data into action is where Chrono truly shines. Here are three real examples that show how Chrono helps teams gain full visibility into their SDLC.

1. Link Work to R&D Impact

In the R&D Dashboard, you can instantly see how many hours go into software development vs. support work across your teams. In one glance, you get total eligible hours, employee contribution, and financial impact. This helps you prove your R&D tax claims without drowning in spreadsheets.

2. Spot Workload Imbalances Instantly

The resource allocation view shows where time is going across every project and team. For example, you can see that Chrono Innovation logged 1,325 hours in January alone. That kind of insight helps you rebalance effort quickly before burnout happens or timelines drift.

3. Zoom Into Daily Execution

With team timesheets, you get a daily breakdown of work per task, project, and developer. You can validate entries easily, track context from connected tools like GitHub or calendars, and stay aligned without micromanaging. It’s how you keep the pace of Agile without losing oversight.

Essential Tools for SDLC Visibility (From Code to Strategy)

To truly see what’s happening across your development lifecycle, you need the right tools working at the right layers. While visibility means tracking code, it also means connecting your delivery data to quality, resourcing, and strategy.

Some tools give you deep insights into workflows, others show you how work ties back to business outcomes. You need both.

Here are the tools that help you build full visibility across every level, from code to company goals.

1. Chrono Platform: Strategic Oversight Across Delivery, Finance, Resourcing, and Risk

Chrono gives you the big picture without losing sight of the details. You get live insights across delivery timelines, resource allocation, team effort, and financial impact.

Also, you can track how work connects to initiatives, flag budget drift, and understand where risk is rising without chasing updates across different systems. If you're looking for full SDLC visibility that bridges engineering, product, and leadership needs, Chrono is your hub. It’s not just data - it’s direction.

2. Jira: Agile Project Planning and Team Coordination

Jira is your day-to-day execution layer. You use it to plan sprints, assign tasks, track progress, and keep everyone on the same page. While it doesn’t show higher-level insights on its own, it plays a major role in visibility when integrated with Chrono. The better your Jira hygiene, the better your visibility.

3. GitHub/GitLab: Developer Workflows, Version Control, PR Metrics

GitHub and GitLab sit at the core of your engineering work. They help your team manage codebases, review pull requests, and automate deployments. You can also surface metrics such as cycle time, review velocity, and code churn.

While they’re not strategic tools on their own, they’re essential for understanding how your team writes and ships code, especially when layered into a broader visibility platform.

4. Datadog/Sentry: Observability and Incident Insights

Once your code goes live, visibility doesn’t stop. Datadog and Sentry help you monitor system health, track incidents, and understand where failures occur in production. They give you the operational visibility you need to respond quickly, reduce downtime, and protect user experience. If you’re serious about end-to-end visibility, you can’t leave these out.

5. LaunchDarkly: Feature Flagging and Controlled Rollouts

Sometimes visibility isn’t just about tracking but more about control. LaunchDarkly gives you that control through feature flags. You can roll out updates gradually, test with real users, and pull features back without deploying new code.

This reduces risk and gives you feedback faster. It’s especially useful in Agile environments where you release frequently and need to keep things safe.

6. Productboard/Aha!: Roadmapping and Product Alignment

At the strategic layer, tools such as Productboard and Aha! help you align your product roadmap with customer feedback, company goals, and engineering capacity. They give context to the “why” behind your backlog and help you prioritize with confidence. When paired with delivery and dev tools, they close the loop between vision and execution.

If you want all of this in one place, Chrono ties it all together.

Scale Your SDLC Visibility With Chrono

If you're serious about improving software delivery, quality, and strategic alignment, you need more than task trackers or code metrics. Chrono connects all layers of your SDLC, from developer workflows to high-level planning, so you can spot delays, manage resources, and keep initiatives on track.

You get real-time visibility across your teams without bouncing between tools or chasing updates. Whether you're reporting on progress or fixing bottlenecks, Chrono helps you do it faster and with more confidence.

Start turning your SDLC data into decisions that actually move the needle. Sign up to Chrono Platform and see it in action.

FAQ

What is the full form of SDLC in Agile?

SDLC stands for Software Development Life Cycle. In Agile, it still covers planning, building, testing, and maintaining software, but it's done in faster, repeating cycles called sprints.

What are the 5 stages of SDLC?

The five core stages are plan, design, implement, test, and maintain. Some teams also include deploy as a separate step. You follow these steps to keep your projects structured and goals on track.

What is visibility in Agile?

Visibility in Agile means being able to see what’s happening across your work, such as what’s blocked, what’s moving, and where effort is going. It helps you plan better and make faster decisions.

What is process visibility?

Process visibility means understanding how work flows through your team. You’re tracking how tasks move from idea to delivery so you can spot delays, bottlenecks, or scope creep early.

How can Chrono Platform help with SDLC visibility?

Chrono brings everything into one view, such as delivery, resourcing, budgets, progress, and risk. You stop guessing and start seeing what’s really going on across your SDLC, all in real time.

Can Chrono be used by CTOs and CPOs?

Yes. Chrono was built to give product and engineering leaders real visibility into strategic progress, delivery timelines, and budget health, without extra meetings or manual reports.

Does Chrono scrutinize individual developers?

No. Chrono focuses on team-level patterns and delivery trends. It's about helping you lead better, not micromanage individuals. Your team keeps its autonomy, and trust stays intact.